This article is Part 2 of a 3-part series discussing how investors can avoid acting irrationally. Read Part 1 and Part 3. Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc fill / Pixabay Investors are prone to two opposing but equally debilitating fears: the fear of missing out when times are good, and the fear of [...]
A client asked recently for my view on Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group and its substantial investment in WeWork, whose CEO evidently has sold WeWork stock to buy properties in New York City and California that he has leased back to WeWork. The question on my client’s mind is whether this [...]
This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series discussing how investors can avoid acting irrationally. Read Part 2 and Part 3. Q4 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc rawpixel / Pixabay The stock market is not your friend. You want to approach it the same way the American president should approach a one-on-one meeting [...]
Corporate acquisitions often fail for one simple reason: the buyer pays too much. An old Wall Street adage comes to mind: Price is what you pay, value is what you get. It all starts with a control premium. When we purchase shares of a stock, we pay a price [...]
Like many professional investors, I love companies that pay dividends. Dividends bring tangible and intangible benefits: Over the last hundred years, half of total stock returns came from dividends. Q4 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc Pexels / Pixabay In a world where earnings often represent the creative output of CFOs’ imaginations, [...]
Wall Street glorifies companies that beat quarterly estimates by arguing that the long term comprises a lot of short terms. But beating earnings estimates for a few consecutive quarters doesn’t necessarily lead to long-term greatness. It assumes that significant changes to the business are visible in the reported numbers. Q3 [...]
I simply don’t trust the fundamentals of the global economy right now. The system is built on quicksand. Debt is growing globally and governments are running huge deficits while interest rates are still incredibly low. Looking at almost any metric, stock markets have been more expensive once in the last 100 [...]
Recently my firm replaced all of our short-term bond exchange-traded funds with U.S. Treasury bills. The core motive for this decision was not to pick up a few points of extra yield, though that’s a nice bonus. We sold these ETFs because we were concerned about the low-probability but [...]
Here’s a big question I’d be asking if I owned Tesla stock: What happened to 345,000 reservations? When Tesla's Model 3 was released, it was supposed to be a $35,000 car. Four hundred thousand people, including yours truly, put down a $1,000 deposit to reserve their spots in line so they [...]
I just finished a ten-page quarterly letter to clients and am taking refuge here to write about anything other than stocks. This scribble will be about a topic that I have been thinking about the last six months. I am somewhat embarrassed about it, because it’s a bit “me”-centered, [...]
